The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

This entry’s going both to my blog and the BabyBlog, because it was just too weird to limit to one place.

I had a show at ComedyWorx tonight. Normally when I do a show on Friday, I stay in town after work instead of driving back to Fuquay just to turn around and come back to Raleigh. In a bit of a change from our normal routine, Holly IM’d me asking if I’d like to have dinner in Raleigh with her and Hayley. Of course, I said yes.

We hemmed and hawed trying to pick a resturant, and finally settled on Casa Carbone, a small but well-known Italian place. We’d eaten there once before, but it had been years.

We got there and had a nice dinner. Hayley was extremely well-behaved, laughing and talking, coloring in a coloring book they brought by, not whining at all. She was getting a little antsy right at dessert time, wanting to go see the fish, so we got the check and started gathering our stuff.

Suddenly, this guy shows up at our table. Probably in his late 30s, business casual dress, not one of the wait staff. He comes up to me and says “Excuse me, but Senator Helms would like to say hi to your daughter.”

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I look around, and sure enough, sitting at a table on the opposite wall, is former 30-year US Senator Jesse Helms and his wife. Now, I’m not a huge Helms fan. In fact, I probably disagree with more of his positions than I agree with. But I do have a certain degree of respect for the man’s career, and the position that he held, so I turned to Hayley, picked her up, and said “Hayley, you’re going to meet someone important. Be sweet.”

We walked over to the Senator, I shook his hand, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve been having the time of my life watching this little girl. She’s beautiful, and very smart.” I told Hayley to say hi, and she responded “Hi, I’m Hayley.” He said hi to her, then she said “I wanna go see fish.” So I put her down, and she ran over to Holly and the aquarium, completely unimpressed by what just happened. Some other people came in at that point and started talking to the Senator, so I excused myself, signed my check, and left. He looked old (not shocking, since he’s around 84 and has had health problems over the past few years). But he was very nice to Hayley, and in a tally book that includes segregation, ignoring AIDS, and being obsessed with Cuba, is now offset to a small degree by a check mark in the “pretty cool” column.

With all my years of improv, it’s fairly hard to rattle me, but the whole encounter was so random, I didn’t think to get him to sign something for Hayley’s baby book, or take a picture with my camera phone. So all we have is a blog entry, and a memory of an extremely random encounter in a resturant. It’ll be a fun story to tell Hayley when she gets older.

Funny how a series of chance decisions (Holly just happened to want to meet me for dinner, we just happened to pick that place, we just happened to be running later to the resturant than we had originally planned) all led up to that. As I said, a very random day.